Análisis de redes sociales e historia contemporánea

This paper aims to discuss the potential of social network to highlight hidden or nonlinear patterns in relational data analysis in contemporary historical research. Individuals —and many other entities— can be suitably shaped by the presence of connections with others, in time or space, due to institutional affiliation or patronage, transactions or migration, etc. Network analysis’s methods and its graphic tools help visualize networks and their dynamics diachronically, assess the role of single individuals in bonding or bridging other actors, rank them according to their «centrality» or «core-periphery» scores, identify structures across individuals and simplify complex structures through block-modeling.